Measurement of Power Consumption in Digital Systems

A study on different measurement configurations for the estimation of power consumption of processing systems is presented. The problem addressed is to measure the energy consumed by a digital system during a number of clock cycles and to assign this consumption to a specific group of instructions. This kind of energy measurement provides the information needed for determining the energy consumption of specific software routines that run on digital processing systems. The proposed configuration is expected to provide clear information about the power behavior of single-chip processing systems as it may monitor the energy consumption during different tasks of operation. Furthermore, it may be integrated in the same chip as a peripheral unit that may be turned on periodically as the front-end circuit of an accurate built-in self-test configuration